Exploring current and past conspiracies from a logical view point. Also bringing you legal and practical information about cryptography.If you're the victim of a conspiracy, you need crypto.

02 July 2011

HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO KEEP A SECRET?

A
quick note to my readers. I am spending a lot of time travelling this summer so,
at least through
September, I will be posting only once a month.

Also,
I have received
several emails regarding some recent conspiracies; most notably on
some current court cases regarding the 2nd
amendment. I am looking into these and will probably be writing about
them in late October or early November. Stay tuned.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY GRANDSON, LOGAN!

HE TURNS 2 TODAY

As
I said in my very first posting back in 2007, I don't wear a
tinfoil hat, I don't believe that aliens had a damn thing to do with
JFK's assassination and I don't think the CIA is causing hurricanes
to weaken foreign countries.

I
won't get into any
argument (right now)
for or against the belief
that aliens have ever visited earth. I do, however, want to debunk one
often used argument meant to supposedly “disprove” the alleged Roswell spaceship
crash.

I
have often heard it said that, if the Roswell incident did happen,
there is no way that the 75 to 100 people that were actually
involved; about a third of which were civilians (and therefore
supposedly less able to keep their mouths shut) could ever keep it a
secret.

HuffPost
Social News had a comment from Dave24 that said “The
government couldn't keep Watergate a secret, yet they've kept alien
spacecraft a secret for decades, and have done so across many
administra­tions. Nonsense.1”

Of
course, the fact is that if a flying saucer DID
crash in New Mexico, it's definitely NOT a secret2,
but that's beside the point. The question is: could a lot of people
conspire to keep a really big secret for years? And succeed? How
about 12,000
people?

To get an answer,
lets look at a really big secret. How about Ultra: the allied
breaking of the Nazi and Japanese codes during WWII. How many people
worked on it, how many were civilians and how long was the secret
kept?

Anyone
that has studied WWII knows now that Ultra was probably the most
closely guarded secret in military history. According to Roswell
logic though, that would have been impossible.

First;
the people. According to Wikipedia
over 12,000 worked at the intelligence center at England's Bletchly
Park throughout the war. A large portion were civilians, including
chess
champions, crossword experts, and mathematicians3.”
But
there's more.

The
ultimate refinement of Nazi code making was the Enigma; a
typewriter-like machine that produced one of the most secure
encryptions available. For a while. Polish cryptanalysts had been
working on German codes since 1930 and succeeded in breaking the
Enigma code in 19344.
When
WWII broke out in 1939 and Poland was overrun by the Nazis, work was
transferred to the French and British. After America got into the war
at the end of 1941, we got our hands into Enigma cracking. That's a
lot of people in a lot of countries working on a big job for a long
time.

So
how well was the secret kept?

In
1974, a British gentleman by the name of FW Winterbottom5
went to the government and asked permission to finally reveal all
that had been done by Allied cryptanalysts. Winterbottom had worked
in Bletchley
Park and knew a lot about it; a good source for a defining literary
work. It was decided by the powers that were that no further value
could be gained by keeping Bletchly a secret any more and permission
was granted. “The Ultra Secret” was published6
and the secret was out.

From
1930 to 1974, a period of 44 years, over
12,000
military and civilian personnel from no less than 5 countries kept
their work hidden from not only the press and general public, but
even from their wives and husbands. I don't know how many American and British administrations that period covered, but it was quite a few. Lots of people over lots of years. And yet the secret remained intact and was only revealed after careful consideration by the leaders; not by some nosy reporter.

Could
a hand full of people, both military and civilians from a single
country and under threat of prosecution keep a secret for 50 years?
If history is any yard stick, you damn rights they could.

But
did the US Army spirit off any deceased aliens with big black eyes?
That's for another time.

To
learn more about the history of WWII cryptography and the breaking of
the Enigma, see my
April 15th posting: “A Crypto Reading List” for some good reading.
Most books mentioned are available at your local public library.

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1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

For lack of real evidence, I am not sure if Roswell was aliens or a top secret government project that crashed or just an urban myth. For that matter, I don't know if area 51 is anything more that a research facility or in fact a prison for Aliens and reverse engineering facility to build our own UFOs.

I know that the more people involved in a secret the less secret it in fact is. It would be pretty difficult to keep an entire nation's lips sealed about our next stealth bomber or superplane so I am not so concerned with those types of government secrets. Surely some sort of civilian oversite is in order to keep the government in check but keep the important secrets in as few hands as possible.

That said the Enigma cracking secret is impressive. I am sure that of the many thousands that were involved at various points, not a lot of them know what exactly they were working on be still, if just 1% of the 12,000 people knew enough to betray the process then it would have been nearly 3 times as many as are rumored to have whitnessed Roswell's incident